During a conversation that took place in Montréal, a woman said in French an equivalent of this: “Buy him some chocolate; he likes that.”
Here’s how she said it:
Achètes-y du chocolat ; y’aime ça.
Buy him some chocolate; he likes that.
Achètes-y? What the woman said is an informal equivalent of achète-lui du chocolat, il aime ça.
In achète-lui (buy him), she contracted the lui to ‘i (shown above as y).
But that’s not all:
In codified (standard) French, the s of the imperative achètes drops before lui, which is why it’s achète-lui, and not achètes-lui. But when the contracted form of lui is used instead, the s is retained in colloquial language: achètes-y, and not achète-y. This means the contracted ‘i (or y) really sounds like zi (achète-zi).
achète-lui: codified French
achètes-y (achète-zi): colloquial French
In the second part of what she said, she contracted il to i’ (shown above again as y).
il aime: codified French
y’aime: colloquial French
Further reading:
Contracted French
How might you say “how do you say” and “how do you spell” in French? (#1132)
Posted in Entries #1101-1150, tagged comment dit-on, comment que, français québécois, Québécois French on 26 May 2016| 2 Comments »
One of the first things you might’ve learned in French was how to say “how do you say X in French?” I’m guessing you probably learned to say it as comment dit-on X en français? This is correct, of course, but it doesn’t sound terribly colloquial.
Maybe you’ll remember from past posts that colloquial French avoids the inversion after question words like pourquoi, où, quand, comment. You’re not very likely, then, to hear comment dit-on…? in colloquial French.
During a conversation, someone asked me this very question in French. He wanted to know how to say blé in English. Here’s how he asked me the question:
Le blé en anglais, on appelle ça comment?
How do you say blé in English?
What’s blé called in English?
You’ll notice that the question word comment doesn’t appear until the very end. It’s possible to move it forward, but in this case there’s a high probability that you’ll hear a que get slipped in after it in colloquial language: le blé en anglais, comment qu’on appelle ça?
Just be aware that comment que is considered by certain people to be faulty because codified French doesn’t accept it. This means its use should be limited to informal language situations. At any rate, it’s not necessary for you to adopt comment que as a learner of French; the first example above (on appelle ça comment?) is fine for you to use in colloquial situations.
You’ll find more posts about comment que here. For example, we’ve already seen the question Oignon, comment qu’on écrit ça?, meaning how do you spell oignon? In this question, of course, comment que can also be avoided by moving comment to the end: Oignon, on écrit ça comment?
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The OffQc book C’est what? will help you get your bearings in the colloquial variety of French spoken in Québec and pave the way for further independent study. You can buy and download it here.
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